3- Feeling what I really feel.

This post is the fourth of a series of preparation exercises for Bring Yourself To Work Day. The purpose of this exercise is to improve your ability to feel.

I'm the sort of person who, when asked how he feels, most often responds by quite unselfconsciously replying, "I think I feel ... ." I recall one of my teachers responding, "I know you do, now WHAT IS IT THAT YOU FEEL?"

That's harder for me. Truth told, I don't often feel any sensation. I'm not stone, but I, well, kinda live in my head a lot. I can miss dinner and not feel like I've missed anything at all if I'm engaged in some satisfying intellectual pursuit. I inherited a remarkably high pain threshold. Before I had back surgery in 2001, I contracted shingles. When I reported my 'mildly annoying rash" to my doctor, he asked how that pain compared with my unrelenting back pain. "No comparison," I said. "Shingles don't qualify as pain."

"Let's go ahead and schedule that back surgery," my doctor replied.

So, when it comes to feeling what I really feel, I'm a master of cluelessness. Maybe this ability qualifies me to speak about feeling what I really feel. I have to work at it harder than some. For those who would classify themselves as 'natural feelers,' their feelings just seem to visit them, like my thoughts visit me. They might well struggle to define some meaning for them, but they have no problem experiencing their feelings. I, on the other hand, jump right to meaning and get stuck there. I know I'm feeling something when my thinking shifts. Invariably, when I remember to check my feelings then, I find something genuine gurgling there.

I've adopted a little trick to remind me to check in with how I'm feeling. I carry a stone in my right front pocket, a piece of rose quartz I took from Virginia Satir's gravesite in Crested Butte, Colorado. Satir, a pioneer in what came to be called family therapy, had the remarkable ability to sense another's feelings. I've studied her work for many years and found in it some clues to sensing my own feelings. The little stone reminds me to check.

It's too easy to check out when you check in at work. The old, familiar patterns blunting your connection between experience and feelings about the experience might seem irrelevant in the context of putting your head down and accomplishing something at work. Feelings CAN get in the way. But then, so can numbness, but how would anyone ever know it had?

Feel today. Wear mismatched socks if that will keep you alert. Carry a shard of rose quartz and remember, when you happen upon that stone while fishing around through loose change, to check in to wherever your feelings lurk when you're working. You might catch yourself delighting in something that never quite registered before.

What's so terrible about that?